50
Years And Counting The Impact of the Korean War on the People of the Peninsula

May
2002
by Phil de Haan

AUTHOR'S NOTE: All the links in the text below can be found listed
at the end of the article, including a description of each source. Also,
all links were working as of May 2002. Books used for this article are
cited at the bottom of the page.

It was 50
years ago next summer that an armistice was signed at Panmunjom,
ending the Korean War and bringing
an uneasy peace to the ravaged peninsula. But for the Korean people,
peace is a relative term. A physical peace has for the most part been
achieved. But a psychological peace is not yet part of the Korean existence.
For the Korean War split a land and separated a people. And no armistice
can remedy that ill.

War, of course,
always exacts a heavy toll on civilians. But the impact of the Korean
War on the civilian population was especially dramatic. Korean civilian
casualties -- dead, wounded and missing -- totaled between three and
four million during the three years of war (1950-1953). Recent media
reports on reunions in Korea estimate that as many as one million civilians
in the northern part of the country fled south ahead of the Communists
in the early days of fighting. Many of those people assumed their flight
to be a temporary measure; they fully expected to return to their lands
after the fighting ended. So many left not just property and heirlooms,
but also close relatives. In fact, this year's government-sponsored
reunions in North Korea brought together some of those families after
50 years of exile.

Somewhere
into the third week,
of not being able to eat,
the cries of the little ones,
turned to a terrible timbre,
and the mothers bent their wills,
at the river's edge, silenced the cries.

Others fled with
both immediate and extended family but then saw their family bonds breached
in the actual rush south as parents were captured or killed and children
were lost or died of starvation.

No one knows for
sure how many families were severed because of the Korean War, but in
the fall of 1999 the world learned of one brutal incident that impacted
hundreds of Korean civilians. That year the Associated
Press told the sad saga of No
Gun Ri, where U.S.
soldiers killed hundreds of South Korean refugees, fearing that
North Korean agents had infiltrated the fleeing families.

The soldiers, AP
said, were unprepared for war, "teenagers who viewed unarmed farmers
as enemies, led by officers who had never commanded men in battle. And
the Koreans were peasant families trapped in their ancestral valley
between the North Korean invaders and the American intervention force."

Such blatant incidents,
in which civilians were shot under direct orders, while perhaps rare,
were not the only dangers Korean civilians faced. They also were often
victims of random and indirect violence. The civilian population suffered
enormous casualties in both the north and the south for the duration
of the three-year war. The city of Seoul,
for example, was first taken by the Communists in their first push south
and then retaken by the UN troops after the amphibious landing led by
MacArthur at Inchon. But when the Chinese entered the war and pushed
the U.N. back to the south, Seoul fell again to the Communists only
to be retaken a fourth time in the subsequent UN counter-offensive.

We
walked weary for weeks,
while the troops and tanks filled the road.
Backs burdened, pushed to the edges,
stumbling, scared we pressed on.
Unsure of that which lay ahead,
but behind only death.

During much of
this fighting civilians were fleeing Seoul (and then returning), but
others stayed in the city the entire time, alternately hiding from the
Communists and welcoming the UN liberators. There, of course, they were
subjected not only to the fates that might befall them should they be
captured by the Communists, they also were exposed to fierce battles
in the street of the city as well as regular overhead bombing raids.

Author Mira
Stout speaks of this in her novel "One Thousand Chestnut Trees."

As the Communist
advance on Seoul her mother's family does not leave. They take shelter
in a small house in Seoul, pretending to be farmers and determined to
stay. But they see others fleeing. And Stout tells us of the horrible
panic that accompanied that flight.

"Millions of people
were heading toward the Han River like sheep toward a cliff," she writes.
But the ferries are overcrowded. Hundreds already have perished in the
Han, drowned on sinking boats or trying to swim across the river. Seoul
does fall, the Han River bridge is obliterated by Rhee's retreating
forces and the family is trapped in Seoul with the enemy.

During this time
of occupation, Stout's narrator, her mother, Myung-ja, visits a school
friend whose family has turned to Communism and Myung-ja worries that
her family will be turned in. This was a legitimate concern. Many non-Communists
in the south and north did meet their death after being turned in by
fellow civilians. Indeed, Korean
writer Pak Wan-so lost her uncle and her brother soon after the war
broke out; both were falsely accused of being Communists and died as
a result. Her 1972 novel, "A Season of Thirst," deals with
her brother's death and the two occupations of Seoul by the Communists.

During the second
occupation of Seoul the escape to the south was even more desperate.
This flight was ahead of the Chinese who were routing the U.N. forces
and moving the front south at a rapid pace. Civilians in Seoul were
understandably panicked, especially when they saw the pace with which
the military was heading south.

When
we at last reached the Han,
the soldiers told us to return,
but we could not, for our homes were gone,
so we crossed that frozen snake,
tears in our eyes from the stinging cold,
not knowing we'd not return.

Stout describes
the scene in "One Thousand Chestnut Trees." Civilians trying
to cross the Han are told to stop by the police. The roads are full
south of the Han. But the poor people of Seoul cross anyhow. And as
they do South Korean policemen begin to shoot. The ice cracks and swallows
up animals and people alike. Bombed-out bridges are not passable but
people attempt to cross them nonetheless, in some cases traversing the
girders above the span. At the railroad station in Seoul the scene is
the same. The train to Taegu, in the south of Korea, is not only full
inside its cars, but also sees people clinging to the sides and the
roof. Those of the top of the train are killed when it reaches the first
tunnel; many on the sides froze to death during the seven-hour journey
south.

The tragedy of
conflicts," said Desfor, "is that it is not only the combatants
who pay with their lives. It is not uncommon for civilians to pay the
price of being caught in the path of war, and it is not uncommon for
the camera to capture such tragic sights. In a street in the heart of
the city, after the immediate shooting passed through the area, I caught
sight of the aftermath of battle. Lying in the street were a man and
his wife, she cradling a young man in her lap, helplessly sprawled in
the midst of their household possessions, which were strewn on the ground.
They apparently had been caught in the crossfire as they tried to flee
the area.

"On another
occasion, I photographed another heart-rending scene. A mother was awkwardly
sprawled in death on the side of a road. Alongside her were her two
children, crying and bewildered, left there to an unknown fate."

Desfor, incidentally,
would win a Pulitzer-prize
in 1951 for a picture of civilians attempting to cross one of the damaged
bridges as they fled to the south.

But it was not
just those in the south who suffered. In the north, too, civilians were
subject to both fire from UN ground troops and regular and intense air
campaigns. They also were subject to intense recriminations from the
UN forces each time the UN pushed back to the North. The South Koreans
were capable of great cruelty to the North Koreans; equal to that meted
out by the North Koreans during the Communist push to the south. And
that cruelty extended to the south too. In the Associated Press package
on No Gun Ri it noted that: "In one notorious case, two South Korean
army officers were sentenced to life in prison in 1951 for leading an
army massacre of 187 people in a South Korean village deemed supportive
of communist guerrillas."

Fire
fell from high above,
as we cowered below the ground.
Emerged, into the light,
eyes burnt by smoke and tears, to see.
Our town near the Chongchon,
flattened, only the chimneys still stood.

Even after most
of the fighting in Korea had ended (primarily during the two years of
peace talks from 1951 to 1953) the bombing of the north continued. For
while bombs were an important military
strategy early in the war, they became a primary means of military might
in the latter stages of the conflict (even during the peace talks).
This included final stage bombing campaigns against dams and water supplies
that flooded much of the rice paddies and destroyed the crops, thus
subjecting the people to terrible famine.

It's easy sometimes
to think of bombs as sterile instruments of war. They're dropped from
on high and when their fall is observed, often in old, grainy, black
and white footage, they look almost harmless. But for the people on
the ground the impact of a bombing campaign is catastrophic. And now
and again, in an unexpected place, there are reminders of what bombs
did in Korea. Take a passage early (page four) in Richard Kim's 1964
masterpeice The Martyred in which Kim describes living in Pyongyang
early in the war as a member of the South Korean army. He writes of
the scene after the first U.N. occupation of Pyongyang:

"The people
were back at their labor, working as silently and stubbornly as they
had day after day. Ever since I arrived in the city, I had been watching
these people. Occasionally, I saw them drag out of the debris some shapeless
remains of their household goods or, sometimes, a dead body, which they
would quietly carry away on a hand-pushed cart. Then they would continue
digging in the crumbled mess of brick, boards, and chunks of concrete."

This scene was
repeated in towns and villages across North Korea where the bombs fell
from the sky with terrible and predictable regularity. Compounding the
destruction was the terrain of the rugged peninsula, described by the
United
States Air Force (and many others) as "an inhospitable site
for a war." Korea is about the size of Minnesota, but unlike that
state Korea is predominantly rough and mountainous, with peaks rising
to 8,700 feet in the northeast. From those mountains a range extends
south along the east coast of Korea. That range then supports several
smaller spurs that run southwest. The mountains thus tend to restrict
movement in any direction across the country and effectively shrink
the size of the country in terms of "fighting space." Because
of this the war tended to be restricted to certain key sectors and most
of those involved heavy civilian populations. It was a recipe for terrible
loss of life.

While accurate
numbers for deaths are imprecise, various sources approximate the war's
South Korean civilian casualties -- dead, wounded and missing -- at
about one million people. North Korean civilian casualties were perhaps
twice that, many of them as a result of the U.N. bombing campaign. The
numbers vary, but it's probably safe to say that there were somewhere
between three and four million Korean civilian casualties; this at a
time when the total population was some 30-40 million people! And civilians
died at a ghastly rate in Korea. Historian Bruce Cumings, in a 1994
article
in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, notes that civilian casualty
rates in the Korean War were nearly 70 percent of total casualties,
compared to about 40 percent in World War II.

According to a
June 20, 2000 article in the Korea
Herald: "The war left about 5 million people dead, wounded
or missing, more than half of them civilians. It also left more than
10 million people separated from their families, 300,000 war widows
and 100,000 war orphans."

Indeed, those war
orphans were part of a huge river of refugees that summer of 1950. And
such incidents were the beginnings of an adoption stream between Korea
and the US that continues to flow today. A
recent PBS
series on international adoption notes that:

"In 1955 Harry
Holt, an Oregon farmer, was so moved by the plight of orphans from the
Korean War that he and his wife, Bertha, adopted eight children from
South Korea. The arrival of these children to their new home in Oregon
received national press coverage, sparking interest among Americans
from all over the country who also wanted to adopt Korean children.
In partial response, Harry and Bertha Holt created what has become the
largest agency in the US specializing in Korean children - Holt
International Children's Services." Holt has been facilitating
international adoptions for almost 50 years (including this author's
two
Korean children).

In addition to
orphans the Korean War created another phenomenon, bi-racial
children, born to Korean women and "fathered" by American
soldiers. In fact the Korean government's Ministry of Social Affairs,
created after the war, sent mostly mixed-race children overseas for
adoption in the first decade of its existence. In a society devoted
to bloodlines, and for much of its existence known as the hermit kingdom,
bringing other races into the culture was seen in an extremely negative
light.

And while many
of those children who were left parentless by the war eventually found
families through adoption, other children were often too old for such
placements and simply wandered until the war's end. A movie made during
the Korean War, called "The
Steel Helmet," touches on this when it pairs a crusty American
soldier with a young South Korean boy. The soldier's company has been
killed; only he survived. The boy's parents, he tells the solider, "are
with Buddha." So together the two set out for shelter. Such stories
are not sprung from the director's imagination but are indeed factual.

One such boy is
depicted in Helie Lee's "In
the Absence of Sun: A Korean American Woman's Promise to Reunite Three
Lost Generations of Her Family." Lee's grandmother, Halmoni,
had a son, Lee Yong Un (Helie's uncle), who was left behind in North
Korea in the confusion of the wartime flight of civilians from the North
to the South. Helie's grandmother made it with four of her children
(including Helie's mother), but not with Lee Yong UN, just 16. And although
the family searched for him for years he seemingly had disappeared and
they gave him up for dead, one of hundreds of thousands of civilian
deaths that the war inflicted. But he had not died. And for 40 years
he lived in North Korea, not knowing what had happened to his family.

Then, in 1991,
he was located in the north. And in her book "Still Life With Rice,"
Helie Lee included a letter from his daughter that included the names
of relatives still in North Korea, a letter that severely compromised
those relatives. Having placed them in danger, Lee set out to rescue
them. "In the Absence of Sun" traces that rescue mission from
conception to completion. In the end there is success for the Lee family
as their separation comes to a glorious conclusion.

A
year's worth of bombs and bayonets;
to what end, for what gain?
To build even higher
the wall across our ancient land?
Questions without answers,
from a generation of lost children.

But for millions
of Koreans the wait continues. And the war lives on.

LINKS IN ABOVE
TEXT (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE)

http://www.trumanlibrary.org/korea/A joint project between the Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower
Presidential Libraries developed to provide access to Korean War materials
related to the two administrations occupying the White House during
that period

http://korea50.army.mil/
This is the official, public access web site for the Department of Defense
commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Korean War and is "the
starting point for all public information regarding events during the
commemoration period which runs from June 25, 2000 through November
11, 2003"

http://www.henryholt.com/nogunri/
Website for publisher Henry Holt with information on the book "The
Bridge at No Gun Ri" by the three AP reporters who broke the story,
including reviews, excerpts, author profiles and a link to declassified
government documents showing orders at the warfront to kill refugees

http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/history/korea/no71-4.htm
United States Air Force page on "United States Air Force Operations
in the Korean Conflict 25 June - 1 November 1950" and prepared
July 1, 1952 as USAF Historical Study No. 71 by Air Force Historian
Dr. Albert Simpson and Dr. Robert Futrell

Brady, James ~
The Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea (2000)
Futrell, Robert ~ The United States Air Force in Korea (1961, reprinted
in 1996)
Hastings, Max ~ The Korean War (1988)
Kim, Richard ~ The Martyred (1964)
Lee, Helie ~ Still Life With Rice (1996); In the Absence of Sun (2002)
Steuck, William ~ The Korean War: An International History (1995)
Stout, Mira ~ One Thousand Chestnut Trees (1999)
Tucker, Spencer ~ Encyclopedia of the Korean War
West, Philip and Suh Ji-moon ~ Remembering the Forgotten War (2001)